The Black Unicorn by Terry Brooks

“Hear it!” the River Master said in Ben’s ear, exultant. The player of the pipes lifted the pitch gradually, and the song rose higher into the fury of the storm. Slowly it transcended the dark and the wet and the chill, and the whole of their surroundings began to alter. The howl of the storm diminished as if blanketed away, the chill gave way to warmth, and the night brightened as if dawn had come already. Ben felt himself lifted as on a cushion of air. He blinked, disbelieving. Everything about him was changing — shape, substance, time, everything. There was a magic in the music that was greater than any he had ever encountered, a power that could alter even nature’s great force.

Torchlight brightened as if the fires had been given new life, and the slope was lit with their glow. But there was a new glow as well, a glow that hung on the night air like incandescence. It radiated out across the slope and downward to the waters of the lake. The waters had gone still, the churning smoothed away as a mother’s hand would smooth a sleeping child’s ruffled hair. The glow danced at the water’s edge, a living thing.

“There, High Lord — look!” the River Master urged. Ben stared. Bits and pieces of the glow had begun to take shape. Dancing, whirling, lifting against the torchlight, they had begun to assume the forms of fairy creatures. Slight, airy things, they gathered strength from the glow and from the music of the pipes and took life. Ben knew them instantly. They were wood nymphs, the same as Willow’s mother — childlike creatures as insubstantial as smoke. Limbs flashed and glistened nut-brown, hair tumbled waist-length, tiny faces lifted skyward. Dozens of them appeared as if from nowhere and danced and flitted at the shores of the mirrored lake in a kaleidoscope of movement.

The music heightened. The glow radiated the warmth of a summer’s day, and colors began to appear in its brightness — rainbow shades that mixed and spread like an artist’s brush strokes on canvass. Shape and form began to alter, and Ben felt himself transported to another time and place. He was young again, and the world was all new. The lifting sensation he had experienced earlier intensified, and he was floating free of the earth, free of gravity’s pull. The River Master and the player of the pipes floated with him, birdlike in the sweep of sound and color. Still the wood nymphs danced below him, whirling with a new exhilaration into the glow, into the air. They spun outward from the shore’s edge, skipping weightless across the waters of the still lake, their tiny forms barely touching the mirrored surface. Slowly they came together at the lake’s center, forming intricate patterns as they linked briefly and broke away again, linked and broke away.

Above them, an image began to take shape in the air.

“Now it comes!” the River Master breathed from somewhere so distant that Ben could barely hear him.

The image came clear, and it was Willow. She stood alone at the edge of a lake — this lake — and held in her hand the bridle of spun gold that was the vision of her dream. She was clothed in white silk, and her beauty was a radiance that outshone even that created by the music of the player and the dance of the wood nymphs. Rushed with life, her face lifted against the colors that spun about her, and her long green tresses fanned out in the whisper of the wind. She held the bridle out from her as if it were a gift and she waited.

Beware! a voice warned suddenly, a voice so tiny as to be almost lost in the whirl of the vision.

Ben wrenched his eyes momentarily from Willow. From what seemed an impossible distance below. Edgewood Dirk stared up at him.

“What’s wrong?” Ben managed to ask.

But the question was irretrievably lost in what happened next. The music had reached a fever pitch, so intense that it locked away everything. The world was gone. There was only the lake, the whirl of the wood nymphs, and the vision of Willow. Colors flooded Ben’s vision with impossibly bright hues, and there were tears in his eyes. He had never known such happiness. He felt as if he were breaking apart inside and had been transformed.